“... the poet-professor, inordinately pleased with his apposite quotations from Mark Twain and Thomas Hardy; the passionate youth who didn’t want to read anything at all, so that his feelings and insights would remain pure; the shy, spiritual poet who, when asked how Buddhism had informed his poetry, replied, ‘I like the silences’; the energetic and ...”

“... though he didn’t make the most successful film made according to Dogme principles, which was Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen – wasn’t really a vow of chastity but of poverty, since any film made according to the principles would come in cheap. Disowning the kitsch manipulativeness of Hollywood style was a strategic way of claiming the moral high ground ...”

“... European poets having direct access to the True Language. In a somewhat similar way, for all Sir Thomas Browne’s descanting on the perennial mystery, ‘What song the Sirens sang’, one finds that Homer actually provides a complete transcription – and very beautiful it is too – at Odyssey, 12, 184-91. I always used to imagine that the god-words in ...”

“... for Becket’s Bones. The dean now and then compared his own struggles for truth with those of St Thomas, though the dean’s bones and indeed the rest of him are easier to track. But it was politics rather than saintliness which got him the deanery, through the rare coincidence of a Labour prime minister in the shape of Ramsay MacDonald and a leftish ...”

“... social lives – impressive in the sense that, say, Durkheim’s work on suicide is impressive, or Thomas Masaryk’s. Durkheim, in Le Suicide, famously distinguished types of suicide – the egoistic, the altruistic and the anomic – and argued that the different types expressed different conditions of society. Or, in sociology-speak: At any given moment ...”

“... lives in the unvarying climate of central Eurasia had failed, so the Hippocratics thought, to grant them either physical or moral resilience. Their libido was accordingly as flabby as their stomachs. They were too fat to have sex even if they wanted to, and if they did, the women, in addition to being ‘personally fat and lazy’, had so much internal ...”

“... words), whatever the subsequent reports of her deathbed piety and preparedness. The playwright Thomas Dekker described the news of her death as landing ‘like a thunderclap’ among her stunned subjects, who ‘never understood what that strange outlandish word Change signified’.Having ‘studied the Tudors for decades’, Doran tells us that she ...”

“... lovers. Among the most influential of these dancer-lovers was Michael Somes, who, with Alexander Grant and Brian Shaw, remained loyal throughout hit career. Somes was a charismatic leading man, and partner to Fonteyn. There were inevitable jealousies within the company when Somes – at 17 – was given leading roles, but Ashton was too professional to risk ...”

“... own election that silences, or ought to silence, any post-Movement tendency to scoff. Like Dylan Thomas, like Graves, Heaney assumed the noble vestments, but he did so with an engaging awkwardness, a persuasive lack of flourish. One of the fascinations of Heaney’s work, read from the beginning until now, is in observing how he shifts this way and that to ...”

“... A ‘hereditary predisposition to suicide’ was believed to run in families, and even M. Carey Thomas, the progressive president of Bryn Mawr, ‘placed considerable emphasis on students’ family back-grounds and the mental characteristics inherited from their parents’. In June 1904, Kathy, now Kate, married Tom Hepburn, a classmate of her sister ...”

“... hear my heartfelt supplication to relieve me of this condition. Will Jesus, who is so good, grant me this grace? Will he at least free me from the embarrassment caused by these outward signs? Between the wars Padre Pio’s fame grew, thanks to the stigmata and to endless stories about his miracles: there were tales of bilocation, inexplicable ...”

“... and ‘highly charged rhetorical flourishes’ he finds in the writing of Howard Fast and Thomas Paine (as well as in his favourite books about baseball). He is also moved by the very same passages of ‘high demotic poetry’ from World War Two that once affected Alexander Portnoy: ‘So they’ve given up/They’re finally done in, and the rat is ...”

“... I have a goodly heritage.’ Unexpectedly, however, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted John Thomas Scopes for promoting evolutionary theory in the 1920s, turns out to have been less of a villain than he is usually painted. Scopes may have famously defended evolution, but he was also a keen advocate of eugenics, a creed which the anti-Darwinist Bryan ...”

“... mat- tresses, a low cupboard, a washbasin, an earthenware jug, some tin mugs. The four Dutchmen, Thomas, Johan, Wim and Paul, drank a strange, sluggish beer . . . For a modest fee she would grant them ‘grace and favour’ in her room. One at a time, twenty minutes each. Or else all five of them at once, at a ...”

“... by Gunnar Heiberg was a parody of the Norwegian national anthem. While in Paris, according to Sir Thomas Beecham, he showed a ‘decided preference for low life’, and we can be fairly certain he contracted syphilis there. The Treponema lay low in him until 1910, when he had a severe bilious attack and developed headaches and back pain, severe enough for him ...”